Unhallowed Ground

by Kristen Gupton

  He remembered the fight with Brian, the trauma afterward pushing what was left of his alcohol-induced stupor away. However, there was now a hefty dose of morphine in his blood, courtesy of the ambulance crew.

  Robert tipped his head back, seeing one of the women he’d gone to high school with years ago. “Sara, what the fuck is going on?”

  The nurse flicked a glance down at him, having no particularly fond memories of her former classmate. “We’re taking you to surgery. Brian cut you open.”

  “I don’t want to go to surgery!” he screamed, fighting harder against his restraints, thrashing his head against the small pillow beneath him.

  “You don’t have a choice,” she replied without compassion. “We either put your insides back in you or you die.”

  The vision of his entrails sliding through his hands after Brian had tumbled out the window was slapped back into his mind. He tried to lift his head enough to see his stomach. His shirt had been cut away, a mound of saline-soaked gauze now blanketing the pile of his intestines still resting against his skin.

  The hallway suddenly went dark, and his gurney was brought to a halt.

  “Goddamn it!” Sara growled. “Not the time for the power to go out!”

  “Gen will kick on in a minute,” someone else replied.

  “Why aren’t the emergency lights on?” asked another voice.

  “Guys, just hold still and give it a minute. They’ll come on. Us getting worked up over this isn’t going to help,” replied the second voice.

  Robert let his head fall back against the gurney. If there was any ambient light in the corridor, his eyes weren’t adjusted enough to see in it after staring up at the overhead fluorescents.

  Perhaps only seconds elapsed, but with the pain he was in and his mind swimming in morphine, he felt adrift.

  There was a light pressure against the wet gauze covering his open wound. Unable to move to do anything about it, he groaned and clenched his jaw. “Stop touching me!”

  “We’re not touching you, Robert,” Sara replied, still waiting for the emergency lights. “Hold still.”

  “All right, we know where the damned surgery suite is, let’s just go,” said one of the others.

  Robert lifted his head as his gurney started to move again, still feeling someone messing with his injury. Not only was someone touching the gauze, it felt like they were pushing their hand under it and starting to pull at the edge of the wound his guts protruded through.

  Robert gave a hoarse shriek as he felt someone reach into his abdomen, shifting the organs still inside of him around. He began to thrash wildly against his restraints, this time in wild agony as he felt something begin chewing into his diaphragm. He struggled for a few more breaths but found himself unable to draw any air, his consciousness slipping.

  The lights came back on overhead as the gurney was brought through the doors to the surgery suite.

  “He’s seizing! Get the cart!” Sara ordered as Robert blacked out.

  Chapter

  35

  Ryan’s small car came to a stop in the hospital parking lot. He looked over at Kelly. “Well, here we are.”

  “Great,” Kelly sighed as he popped open the car door before slowly hauling his body up and out of the seat. Everything hurt, and his head pounded. However, the doctor had requested he return in twenty-four hours for a follow-up exam, and Ryan’s mother had been adamant Kelly go, or she would drag him down to the hospital herself.

  Ryan shoved his hands into his pockets and walked along in silence beside his friend. Kelly hadn’t been particularly talkative since getting out of the hospital the day before.

  Kelly glanced over at him as they neared the doors. “You don’t have to come in. I know you hate this place.”

  “I spent half my childhood in their ER, I’ll live,” Ryan replied. His frequent troubles with his asthma had brought him here a little too often in the past.

  Once they entered the small lobby, a woman at the front desk immediately recognized Kelly and waved him over. Within five minutes, Kelly was sitting on an exam table in a room, Ryan sitting to the side in a chair and texting Dani.

  The doctor entered, the puffiness under his eyes worse than it had been the day before. “Well, how did you make it through the night?”

  Kelly gave a small shrug. “Neck and head hurt all night so not super great.”

  The doctor came closer and examined the staples in Kelly’s scalp before unhooking an ophthalmoscope from the wall and checking Kelly’s pupil response.

  “No dizziness or loss of consciousness, though?” he asked when he finally stepped back.

  “No, I’ve been okay in that department,” Kelly said.

  The doctor turned and looked at Ryan. “He’s not been having any slurred speech or trouble keeping his balance?”

  Ryan quirked a brow. “No more so than normal.”

  Dr. Hughes gave a nod and moved over to the laptop computer sitting on the room’s counter. He typed in a few things before facing Kelly again. “I think you’ll live. Just keep taking it easy for a few days. If you do have any new symptoms crop up, though, you get in here right away. That was one hell of a whack you took.”

  Kelly nodded and slid off the table, picking up his coat. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to be real active for a while. You look like you could use a break yourself.”

  Dr. Hughes rolled his eyes and shook his head. “If that ain’t the truth. Usually this time of year, it’s all slips and falls from people out shoveling their driveways. Not this week. Had a nasty one come in last night. Evisceration. Real mess. The surgeon was in trying to get this guy’s intestines back in his body until five this morning. I’ve been covering everything else. I’ve honestly been on duty for three days straight.”

  Kelly remembered hearing Robert’s name on the deputy’s radio the day before. Though he wanted to ask, he suspected there would be confidentiality rules to keep the doctor from discussing it.

  “Well, all right. We’ll get out of your hair,” Kelly said, moving toward the door.

  “Come back in two weeks, and we’ll have a look at those staples and get them removed,” Dr. Hughes said, going back to tapping away at the computer to finish Kelly’s record.

  As they started through the lobby, Ryan and Kelly came to a stop. There was a woman standing outside of the glass doors to the lobby smoking a cigarette.

  Ryan wrinkled his nose. “Isn’t that Mrs. Pennick?”

  Kelly gave a single nod. “Yup.”

  “Do you think the call you heard to Deputy Bryant last night and the thing Dr. Hughes just mentioned...?” Ryan let his words trail off as Mrs. Pennick flung her cigarette out into the bushes and turned back toward the doors.

  Kelly merely shrugged as the older woman entered and headed straight toward them.

  Patricia Pennick was in her mid-fifties, but time hadn’t been particularly kind to her. With a rough complexion and frizzed bleached-blonde hair, her looks gave away how tough a life she’d been handed. However, unlike her son, she was a kind woman, and how she’d managed to raise a trouble maker like Robert perplexed most of the town.

  Upon recognizing the young men, she gave them a tired smile and stopped before them. She reached out and placed a hand on Kelly’s shoulder. “Kel, I heard about the Suhrs. I’m real sorry.”

  He offered up an empty smile in return. “Thanks, Mrs. Pennick. What are you doing here? Everything okay?”

  Her eyes teared up, and she shook her head, letting her arm fall back to her side. “No, not at all. That damned Brian attacked Robby last night. Almost killed him.”

  Kelly and Ryan looked at one another, brows raised.

  Patricia sighed and pulled her coat in tighter around her torso despite being in the warm lobby. “Robby managed to push him out the window. Brian’s dead. Bled to death.”

  “Holy shit,” Kelly said, not having expected that detail. “I thought they were friends!”

  “They were,” she replied,
reaching up to wipe away the tears forming. “We don’t know what happened yet. Robby still isn’t in any shape to talk much. It took all night for the doctor to put him back together. They even had to go into his chest as the knife tore up into there. They said it was a miracle that he lived. His liver might be damaged, though. Blood profiles came back showing that something’s wrong. It’s all over my head, though. I wish I understood half of what the doctor said.”

  Kelly didn’t know what to say, and he dropped his gaze to the gaudy hospital carpet. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself and looked off toward the hallway. “They just let me in to see him a few hours ago, finally. You boys want to see him before you go? He’d probably appreciate seeing some of his old friends. I know he won’t get a lot of visitors.”

  Kelly and Ryan immediately both felt horribly uncomfortable with the idea. Robert had been wretched to them their entire lives. Still, his mother had always been desperate for Robert to have other friends besides the crowd he’d generally run with, and she’d never given up the delusion that the others in town didn’t detest her son.

  Still, Mrs. Pennick’s emotional torment was obvious, and Kelly opted to put aside his feelings toward his childhood bully for her sake.

  “We can go in for just a second I guess. We can’t stay long, though. We’ve got something to do for Ryan’s dad,” Kelly said, nearly choking on his words.

  Ryan elbowed him in the side hard, displeased Kelly had volunteered both of them.

  Mrs. Pennick brightened up and nodded, moving around them and heading toward the corridor. “All right, just for a minute, then.”

  They followed her into Robert’s room. He was being kept alone in one of the hospital’s two ICU rooms, the front wall of it made of glass.

  Robert was on his back, the head of his bed elevated. Only his face was visible above the sheet covering his body, his eyes sunken and ringed with black.

  “They took him off the ventilator this morning,” Patricia said, going further into the room and standing at her son’s bedside. “They were surprised he was able to come off it so quick. It was a real good sign.”

  When she reached out and touched his forehead, Robert’s eyes opened slightly. He looked up at her for a moment before noticing the two men lingering near the door. Though his voice was weak and dry, he managed to whisper out, “Round-Boy and Wheezy?”

  Kelly and Ryan both cringed at his childhood names for them. Still, Kelly was determined to be as nice as he could manage, whether Robert deserved it or not.

  “Hey, Rob. Your mom told us you were here. How are you doing?” he asked.

  While he was heavily drugged, Robert’s legitimate confusion over their presence was apparent. “Like crap. Fucking Brian gutted me. Are you two real? Whatever they’re giving me has been making me hallucinate bad. You guys would never come to see me. Shit, that cartoon coyote was just here...”

  “Language, Robby! They’re really here,” Mrs. Pennick said, looking back at the other two.

  Kelly glanced at Ryan before shrugging. “Yup. I was here getting looked at after a little accident yesterday. Ryan’s just my chauffeur. We thought we’d say hi before leaving.”

  “Huh,” Robert croaked back. With his mother there and given the circumstances, he opted to stay on his good behavior. “Well, thanks for stopping in.”

  “No problem. Get better, your mom’s pretty worried,” Ryan said, already placing his hand against Kelly’s back and pushing him toward the door. “Take care, Mrs. Pennick.”

  Kelly went along willingly, relieved once they were back into the corridor. “He didn’t look good.”

  “You usually don’t after someone tries to field dress you,” Ryan replied, shoving his hands in his pockets as they headed toward the exit. “Why’d you agree to see him?”

  “I didn’t do it for Robert, I assure you,” Kelly replied. “I feel bad for his mom. She’s always been nice despite the behavior of her hell-spawn. I think she’s completely alone in the world, you know?”

  “I’m guessing Robert’s dad was a real winner.” Ryan frowned. “I feel bad for her, too, though.”

  “I can’t believe Brian’s dead,” Kelly sighed and shook his head. While they’d had their two classmates die back in elementary school, Brian was only the third one in their peer group to go.

  “Well, given the life he’s led, it’s almost surprising he made it this long,” Ryan replied. “I think he was always as afraid of Robert as the rest of us were on some level, though. Kinda surprised that he attacked him.”

  “To be fair, that’s Robert’s version of events,” Kelly said as they moved through the automatic doors and into the parking lot. “Hate to say it, given how messed up he is, but he’s not exactly the world’s most reliable source.”

  “True.” Ryan pulled out his keys and unlocked the car. “I suppose we’ll get the full story sooner or later.”

  Chapter

  36

  Robert drifted in and out of lucidity for the rest of the day. By the time it was dark out, his exhausted mother had gone home to get some rest. Finally alone, Robert slowly sank into his misery over the chronically disconnected feeling he’d been suffering from the drugs.

  When a nurse came by that evening with another dose of pain medication to inject into his IV line, Robert decided he’d had enough.

  “Whatever that is, I don’t want it,” he growled, childishly trying to hide the IV port on the back of his hand out of her view.

  She frowned and looked down at him. “Mr. Pennick, you’re due for this. If I leave this room without giving it to you, you’re going to be in so much pain from that abdominal wound you won’t be able to breathe right.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” he shot back, pressing his head against his pillow.

  Not in the mood to argue with him, she shrugged and turned for the door. “You know where the call button is when you change your mind.”

  “Yeah, I won’t.”

  Once she was gone, Robert reached over to pick up the small remote for the room’s television. He clicked it on and found the cartoon channel, opting to leave it there for a while.

  As the nurse had predicted, the pain did get increasingly worse. Robert tried to pass it off as long as he could manage, to the point his sheets were drenched in sweat.

  The longer it went on, the more he felt like something else was taking control of his body. Though he knew he wasn’t in any shape to do so, he struggled slowly to get up from the bed to stand.

  He stood there, unsteady. Robert didn’t know what he was going to do, or why he was going to do it. However, the room was simply too hot for him to tolerate. Carefully, and with his stomach feeling like it would rupture, he struggled over toward the room’s window, dragging his IV pole along with him. His intention had been to open it, but he quickly discovered that the frame had been screwed shut.

  The clock on the wall read two a.m. He struggled to get toward the door, leaning heavily against the wall beside it and listening. The faint sounds of assorted monitors made it through the quiet, but he didn’t hear voices.

  In frustration, he tore the IV line away from the back of his hand, disregarding the stream of blood that began to drip from the wound left behind.

  Robert looked down at the gown he’d been left in. It opened in the front, leaving the dressing over his abdomen exposed. He pulled it closed around him as best he could, wanting nothing more than to get outside into the cold for a while.

  He stuck his head into the hallway and looked, seeing the nurse on duty absent from the nurses’ station. After nodding to himself, he moved out of his room and headed down the corridor toward the exit. Though there was someone in the lobby as he passed through, they didn’t pay him any particular attention. He walked out into the freezing night in nothing more than his hospital gown.

  The streets were vacant, and the sky was clear. The sign in front of the bank he passed showed the temperature as 13°
F, but Robert wasn’t bothered in the least. His bare feet didn’t register the cold of the snow on the ground as he continued. The pain from his wound faded out as his conscious thoughts drifted away from his body.

  His apartment was only three blocks from the hospital, and he arrived there within fifteen minutes of leaving. He climbed up the concrete stairs to the second floor and down the walkway toward his door.

  When the investigation had been completed, the landlord had done his best to scrub the bloodstains from the walkway with bleach, and he’d covered the broken window of Robert’s apartment with plywood.

  Robert stopped before his door. He tried the knob to find it locked. With a sigh he reached up above the doorframe, finding the spare key he kept wedged up above.

  He entered and loosely pulled the door closed behind him. There was broken glass from the window still on the ground, and he walked over it unflinching, dropping the key on the floor along the way.

  Robert’s initial overheated feeling had abated during his walk. He went to the thermostat on the wall and turned it up all the way before dropping himself onto the couch and staring out into space.

  Something writhed in his throat, but his expression gave up no indication that he felt anything wrong at all. His mind was pleasantly blank. There was no pain from either his stomach or from his bleeding feet. Robert closed his eyes and let his jaw fall open, a few gray tendrils slowly emerging.

  Chapter

  37

  Kelly woke up, staring at the ceiling in his living room. He’d finally dared to spend the night at his own house, not wanting to overstay his welcome with the McKessels.

  A horn blared outside for the third time, but it was the first one he consciously processed.